Richard Polwhele's ancestors long held the manor of Treworgan, 4 3/4 miles south-east of Truro in Cornwall, which family bore as arms: Sable, a saltire engrailed ermine.
Later that year he married Mary Tyrrell, briefly taking up a curacy at Exmouth before being appointed to the small living of Manaccan in Cornwall in 1794.
[2] When in Devon, Polwhele had edited the two-volume work Poems Chiefly by Gentlemen of Devonshire and Cornwall (1792) for an Exeter literary society.
[2] Polwhele's volumes of poetry included The Art of Eloquence, a didactic poem (1785), The Idylls, Epigrams, and Fragments of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, with the elegies of Tyrtaeus (1786), The English Orator (1796), Influence of Local Attachment (1796), and Poetic Trifles (1796).
He published sermons, theological essays for the Church Union Society, and attacks on Methodism (although he befriended his main Methodist antagonist Samuel Drew).